September 24, 2012

Speaking So As Not To Be Understood

Throughout history the purpose of speaking and writing has been to be make oneself understood. Not any more. There is a new way of speaking and writing in the world of marketing, the purpose of which is to sound like you're saying something without actually saying anything at all.

Welcome to The Golden Age of Bullshit.

Now writers, pundits and industry bigwigs write and speak so as to be misunderstood. They write in ways that intentionally misuse language, and they speak in riddles to hide their vacuity. They hide behind buzzwords and cliches which they throw around willy nilly regardless of context.

The practice of creating a simple declarative sentence that means what it says is outmoded. Today's marketing pundit, in order to be taken seriously, must speak in tongues.

So we get nonsense like this:

"I have a deep love and appreciation of the different roles of product pricing, go-to-market, competitive differentiation, etc that make up the marketing value chain. I’m not discounting the strategic parts of making sure there’s a business model, but I’m focusing on the part that the vast majority of people think of as “marketing”. You and I might know this is more about promotions than the full range of marketing but most people don’t recognize this distinction."

Now you might think that the paragraph above was written by a not-very-bright junior college marketing student. But it wasn't. It was written by a person who claims to be a Stanford lecturer and a Harvard Business Review author.

"Branded content was an interim expression. To me now, saying branded
content is like saying advertising, because it’s all about content and
how we insert the brands into that message to add true utility for the
customer."

Oh.

Here's a simple way to figure out who's full of shit and who isn't. If someone is saying something you don't understand, and it's not about quantum theory or special relativity, more likely than not he's full of shit.

"Caustic Yet Truthful"

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Marketers prefer clear answers that are wrong to vague answers that are right."

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"As an advertising medium, the web is like communism. It's never very good right now, but it's always going to be great some day."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"In the entire history of civilization, nothing good ever happened to a teenager after midnight."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."